‘New York has nothing to fear from alternative business structures’, says the Law Society president.

As a solicitor who retired about 10 years ago, I wish to express my astonishment at that statement. Mr Wotton has a short memory concerning the so-called liberalisation of the banking industry in the 1980s. The banks’ dangerous gambling with money belonging to others and their treatment of the public ‘at street level’ is, even now, hardly credible and has produced a huge distrust and dislike of the banks.

That greedy obsession with profit alone is now presently being exhibited by the proponents of changes to legal practice. One hears little or nothing of the genuine ethical principles of the profession to which I used to belong, which the Law Society endeavoured mightily to enforce.

Will such principles be respected by the new owners of law firms?

Michael H Savage, Newport